Searching for a Different Future: The Rise of a Global Middle Class in Morocco (review)

Shana Cohen's Searching for a Different Future: The Rise of a Global Middle Class in Morocco offers a class-based analysis of the impact of global "market integration" on social change in the Moroccan city of Casablanca. It tackles in a singular way the structural and political forces that have shaped the simultaneous decline of an "old modern middle class" and the rise of a "global middle class" in urban Morocco. While market integration is defined as the process of constructing a universal economic structure, dominated by neoliberalism and consumer culture, Cohen shows that the global middle class is mainly characterized by its impossible realization and alienation.

The book sets two challenging tasks: first, to explore these structural transformations in relation to societal change, and, second, to capture the complexity of lived and imagined realities of the global middle class through substantial accounts of subjects' narratives. Cohen captures these dimensions by combining a post-Marxist analysis of class with psychoanalysis and postmodern insights. The result is a conception of class built at the intersection of Weberian and Bourdieuean definitions of status, dispositions, and social capital as well as a Gramscian approach to hegemony and ideology.

Chapters 1 and 2 look at relationships and ruptures between the older modern middle class, which led the nationalist movement of independence, and the newer global middle class marked by the dynamics of "market integration" and the fading legitimacy of the nation-state. While the first is defined by its inability to build state legitimacy on the social contract of protection, individual fulfillment, and promotion through education and jobs, the second is viewed through its ruptures with the nation-state and its impossible realization.

The term alienation is central to the book's description of both. Suffering from the effects of market integration and loss of legitimacy, the older modern middle class is unable to ensure its former linkages to the nation-state and unwilling to share its historical, political, and economic privileges with the younger generations. The global middle class, in comparison, is subjected to the contradictions of "a system of social evaluation based on quality of participation in the global economy" (11) and a noninclusive and heterogeneous process of market integration. Thus the global middle class is defined as fragmented and divided along lines of distinct career and life trajectories. This take on the middle class pushes the reader to question the legitimacy of defining such a dispersed and heterogeneous body as a class.

Chapter 3 of Looking for a Better Future looks at the composition of the global middle class and proposes three categories that comprise it: the young elites of managers and consultants, the clerics and public servants, and the larger segments of unemployed university graduates. These groups are also divided along lines of education and social background. Notwithstanding these divisions, the global middle class shares a sense of loss and an alienation from existing political institutions. Its members also share the same dreams for self-realization outside the scope of the nation-state and aspire to find expression and place on a global scale. The result is a global middle class defined by its "loss of place and moment for the actualization of self-potential" (33) and its doubts about the state as the arena for enacting changes. The global middle class, claims Cohen, is interested not in changing the state but rather in pushing for a role in the global economy.

Under the title "A Generation of Fuyards," Cohen opens her fourth chapter, which is by far the best illustration of her endeavor to ground the class consciousness of this generation in deep psychological levels of frustration and lack. This chapter points to the loss of the nation-state as the main object of disenchantment of a generation that remains unable to enact a change or inhabit a place imagined within the "nonlocated space of the globe" (108). This chapter...